OK, another provocative title. I’m still looking hard at Bomb Squad psychology to understand better how EOD operators assess situations and make decisions in the heady atmosphere of an incident command post/control post. It’s the cognitive processes that I’m focusing on. The fundamental starting point is that an EOD operation is a puzzle, where the nature of the problem and its solution are not always clear. I fully accept that in many EOD operations the problem and the solution are indeed clear… but it’s when these are not obvious that the challenge is encountered.
My current reading is Daniel Kahneman’s very excellent “Thinking Fast and Slow”. I want time to think slowly about this myself, as some of the concepts are a bit mind-blowing, so again I’ll drip feed some thoughts in coming weeks. Suffice to say Kahneman is a world leading psychologist and Nobel prize winner. Firstly he disrupts what I suspect is the common thinking behind many EOD training systems – that the operator is what psychologists call a “rational agent”. This concept suggests that people behave like systematically, making entirely rational, evidence-based algorithmic decisions and the only challenge is to train them to utilize the correct algorithm. Kahneman points out that this is not the case and makes a convincing argument. People make systematic mistakes and non-logical decisions consistently. In most lives this doesn’t really matter (and he talks extensively about the economic world), but in EOD the consequences of this are serious.
So Kahneman builds a new model for our cognitive processes and it’s a model that I think is leading me to some specifics as far as EOD is concerned. In broad outline (he says) there are two systems we use as cognitive processes:
System 1 – This all about how we use instinct based on little data (Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”) . It is automatic and effortless, and is the product of retained memory and learned patterns of association. It’s all about snap judgments. Sometimes we call it intuition. But we are not good at telling whether it is right or not – if our intuition is right once, we tell ourselves we have “good intuition” and trust our gut every time after that – which in the vernacular is boll0x. Find me one person in the world who doesn’t think they have good intuition. Going back to my earlier posts, I think System 1 tries to fit the limited facts into a “narrative “ – (any narrative) and wings it from there.
System 2 – This is the difficult one. It considers, evaluates and reasons. Importantly for us,in the EOD context, it needs time, and it needs effort. The key point Kahneman makes is that we believe we are using System 2 when we make our threat assessment and plan our RSP… but actually more often than not we are using System 1…. And that’s dangerous because that way makes assumptions on the basis that the narrative “sounds right” (see earlier blogs). So the crucial piece, perhaps, is to “recognise” a System 1 decision when the operator is taking that decision and encourage a System 2 approach. I’m beginning to see some specific techniques that an EOD operator might use to do this and how it might be implemented in training.
Now, System 1 always functions no matter how little data we have. I think as EOD operators we “cage” System 1 with some firm SOPs that stop it getting to out of hand. So, for example, within the British community, the SOPs of “one man risk”, “as few approaches as possible”, “always take positive EOD action”, “always have an EOD weapon on hand on a manual approach” cage and constrain some of the weaknesses of System 1 and encourage good practice. System 2 requires willpower, effort and discipline. It’s hard work, intellectually and most importantly it requires time. As someone famous (Edison, I seem to recall )once said – “There seems to be no limit to which some men will go to avoid the labor of thinking” and Mark Twain said “ Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it”.
I’m intrigued that the time factor is so crucial for System 2, and I wonder if the tempo of EOD operations in Afghanistan is such that the time for a System 2 approach is constrained. I suspect so. As an aside I’m still a little haunted by some hand-written notes I once read about an EOD operator who died in the 1970s. The operator was a youngish Captain with a good track record of IED disposal in an intense operational theatre. But the tempo of operations increased and the operator was clearly tired. His boss when writing in a small innocuous exercise book, as he had dozens of times before about the performance of operators on their “tour”, was simply bewildered why this experienced operator was taking the actions he was taking when the device exploded blowing him across a field, dead. I’m not haunted by the operator, who I never knew, I’m haunted by the desperate words that his OC used as he expressed his lack of understanding as to the actions this man had chosen.
I’m also intrigued by the implication to high intensity tactical operations. The infantry solder, boots on the ground, fights a System 1 battle, while the commander and staff officers fight a System 2 battle…and the EOD operator has to fit his actions with both, depending on the circumstances and I think that causes some dynamic tension that EOD operators have to be trained to cope with.
In future posts I hope to start to develop some possible EOD “specifics” from this System 1/System 2 cognitive process which I’d like to share or have shot down by readers.